'Cow Burp' Scientists Strike Back

They may study cow waste, however their research is anything but.

A team of University of New Hampshire environmental scientists is speaking out against Senator Tom Coburn's claim that their $700,000 research grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture is an example of needlessly frittered taxpayer dollars. ($700,000 is .00007% of the $1 trillion federal deficit. The tax cuts for the rich Coburn championed? Don't ask).

Last week, the conservative Oklahoma Republican, a self-acknowledged fiscal alarmist, released the "Wastebook" report, his annually disingenuous catalog of 100 'wasteful' federally-funded projects. He later went on Fox News to complain the U.S. is headed for "apocalyptic pain" if it doesn't rein in the deficit. Coburn cited the New Hampshire researchers' work as Number 58 on the list for its wasteful goal of examining “greenhouse gas emission from organic dairies, which are cause by cow burps, among other things.”

A couple of days later the scientists shot back that Coburn was flat-out wrong. They told ABC News the senator "cherry picked" quotes and took their work out of context. "This is a caricature of the research based on a few words or phrases for political gain...Much of the research was about how nitrogen in particular, affects ground water," said one of the researchers John Aber.

Their work is actually extremely valuable to the rapidly growing organic farm industry. The researchers cite Stonyfield Farm, one of the largest organic dairy operators and a key player in the New Hampshire economy, as one company that could benefit from the research. Their ultimate goal was to create software to improve environmental management at these dairies. Climate change and water pollution are realities and—as with nearly any health and environmental issue— university research is needed to deal with these threats.

Like it or not, a major portion of scientific funding comes directly through the federal government through competitive research grants issued by agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Geological Survey and yes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  The researchers say this grant was commissioned by USDA and they competed against other institutions to win the funding. Calling this project waste without an example of misconduct, fraud, bias or foul play in the process is an attack on the entire scientific endeavor, let alone on the importance of climate change research.

This is far from the first anti-intellectual attack that "fiscal conservatives" have launched on basic government-funded science, health and environmental research; a number of other examples are included in Coburn's report. And presidential candidate John McCain made headlines in 2008 by calling a study of the DNA of Yellowstone grizzly bears "frivolous," when that sort of data is crucial to the conservation of these threatened animals.

Leaders like Coburn and McCain like to decry any tax dollars that go to scientific or cultural endeavors they don't try or want to understand.

Tell Coburn to back off.

There are plenty of government agencies whose specific job it is to investigate government fraud and waste in a non-partisan way—the U.S. Government Accountability Office and Agriculture Department inspector general, to name a few. If Coburn is going to accuse scientists of waste by creating a report, using taxpayer dollars to pay his staff's salaries while they cherry pick examples, he should at minimum give the accused a chance to respond.

Sign our petition to Coburn to stop wasting taxpayer dollars by creating a Wastebook report.

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Photo credit: JelleS via Flickr